sail on silver girl
by ohtasha
Summary: The grief slowly builds in the shadows and crevices of their mangled lives, until it's gained enough momentum and strength. And then it confronts them.


At first, they grieve individually; there's empathy behind the hugs and handshakes, a sense of common loss, but there's no unity or spark of fusion. The pack disbands, separates into the individuals that comprise it, and for the time being there's no Alpha roar in the world that could bring them back together again. The grief slowly builds in the shadows and crevices of their mangled lives, until it's gained enough momentum and strength. And then it confronts them. And then it hits them like a tidal wave, like a mountain range, like godforsaken hellfire; stabs them like a blunt knife slowly breaking through built-up layers, pierces like a sharp blade being driven home. And the masks crumble away into nothingness.

For Scott, grief hits not when he holds Allison's limp body in his arms, not when her father schools him in the response he is to give to the police; not when he sits in the police station with a deputy trying to make them all relive the moment; not when he has a job to do and a promise to fulfil. (And this one he must fulfil; it hadn't been his mouth that had promised Allison that they would always end up together, but his heart, and he failed.) When Scott's saved the friend he set out to rescue, he thinks about the one he lost along the way.

Bright eyes, bowling, the huntress, a pencil on her first day. Photobooths and lacrosse matches and a dance he wasn't even allowed to be at. It's only been a few hours, though he's lost track of what day it is, and already Scott can't picture her in his head, can't hear her voice. Allison Argent is now purely incorporeal: nothing but memories and feelings and maybe the echo of her laugh and good God, the pain.

The gasping pain of a knife being plunged into his stomach, his back, his neck, his leg: every conceivable part of his body, and then his heart and mind, and he wonders if she ever truly stopped being his anchor. Maybe it was impossible to let go of a hold that strong on someone, even if they'd let go of you.

Only she hadn't really. Grief makes Scott selfish and it's only a temporary glitch in his character, his morality, but when he hears Isaac cry and kick the bedpost, he knows that Allison gave Isaac her last shot and him her last word. And in life they were bound together, regardless of ups and downs and breakups and spats, and when Scott's grip on the kitchen counter gets tighter and his grip on the number of hours he's spent just sitting at the table gets looser, he thinks they must be bound together in death, too.

It's so unconscious it's practically a reflex, but his right hand starts resting on his left arm, on the tattooed bands that were his reward for getting through a summer without her. The wedding bands they'll never have. And when he's at the point where Allison Argent is a patchwork of memories and thoughts he'll never be able to express, that tattoo is the biggest and most permanent part of her he'll ever have. He wears, as he always has done, his heart on his sleeve.

Aiden's death takes longer to hit home, and the guilt that comes with the realisation is a fresh stab wound. Not so painful; in absolute truth, it's more of a dull ache that comes with a rusty blade, but he'd wanted so desperately to be a part of Scott's pack. And in death he'd achieved it, and Scott wonders how many more people will have to die because of his morals, his actions, his way of life.

He finds himself thinking back to Jennifer's English class and the 'heart of an immense darkness'; to Deaton telling the three of them of the darkness that would form around their hearts, and Scott knows he's found that darkness now and it's not just wrapped around his bicep, but his heart and mind, too.

It hits Chris when Allison hangs up the phone and says she won't wait, though then he isn't sure what's making his head spin. A kind of foreshadowing, he later realises, but Allison was the one who'd needed warning.

Chris compartmentalises. Tells Scott what to say, fires silver arrow tips and hopes he's making his daughter proud. He thinks about selling the apartment and moving somewhere else, makes the necessary phone calls and visits for the funeral.

When it really hits him, when it hits like a freight train, like a lightning bolt, like the ceiling has fallen out from under him, is the first time he opens her bedroom door. A mistake, a bigger one than he could have foreseen, and all it takes is the extension of a dozen muscles for his compartmentalising and his training to fall by the wayside. For him to collapse against the woodwork and slide down it onto the floor. To sit there, alternately retching and crying and cursing every spiritual being, for an eternity before his limbs have regained the strength needed to support him.

Because his limbs are all he has left for that purpose. He's trapped in a cycle of gut-wrenching, stomach-churning déjà vu, because he did this for Victoria; only this is so much worse because there's no one to hug him or grasp his hand or take the phone from him and make the arrangements themselves.

Because Chris, now, has no one. And realising that is like standing on the edge of a void and leaning into it, willing the darkness to swallow him up. He survived without Victoria; he doesn't think he can do it without Allison. His little girl. The little girl whose tiny hands he held as she took her first, stuttering, stilted steps; whose hair he washed and dried each Sunday night before school the next day; whose bloodied knees and elbows he tended to when he at last relented and took the training wheels off her bike. The little girl he trained and schooled and taught and refined, and watched grow with every emancipated arrow. The little girl who fell in love like something out of 'Romeo and Juliet', who hid boys in her wardrobe when he walked in. The little girl who grew into a young woman and a better person than he could ever be.

He tells Gerard, lets the stream of abuse sail over his head before he leaves after 5 minutes, swears off that chapter of his life.

_Nous protégeons ceux qui ne peuvent pas se protéger eux-même. _

He failed her.

When all else fails him, Isaac still has his wry sense of humour. So when he's finished kicking the bed post for the time being, when he can't summon any more salt water tears and his throat is thick and his voice is hoarse, he laughs. It's involuntary and completely insane and he hopes Scott and Melissa can't hear him, but it's the sort of thing that appeals to him right now.

Oscar Wilde: "to lose one parent… may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness". And what would Wilde say, Isaac wonders, about losing both parents and your mind and body control? Both parents, your sanity and the girl you loved? Isaac can't count everything he's lost in a lifetime of hardship on one hand; Allison alone, and everything she brought with her, takes at least five digits.

Maybe she didn't love him like he loved her. Maybe they wouldn't have gone the mile together.

But Isaac mourns the loss of Allison and what she gave him, the loss of their time together and the loss of each and every possibility the future may have held. Maybe Lydia was the first to really grieve for Allison, maybe she felt it instantaneously, but she didn't let it stop her. And he did. And Isaac grieved for Allison from the moment she hit the ground, and he grieves for her as he adopts a similar position: on the floor, in the corner, like Dad taught him.

Isaac's used to grieving, but he's never grieved quite like this.

Stiles, nogitsune- but not guilt-free, struggles. Clearing his room out, making a fresh start of it, goes some way to repairing the damage he caused, but it's not enough and it will never be enough. And he knows that when he sees Scott when he thinks no one's looking at him, when Lydia pauses by Allison's old locker and lets her fingertips brush against the cold metal, when he can't bring himself to snipe at Isaac for wearing a scarf in summer.

The truth is, he doesn't think he's allowed to mourn Allison, and because of that, because he's stemming the flow and trying to reverse the tides, it hasn't hit him yet. He knows and he will always know that he brought her death on himself; that if he hadn't been so weak, none of this would've happened. That she died trying to save him and in the end it was for nothing: killing the oni made no difference, and that's a bitter truth that Stiles simply can't swallow.

Deaton warned him of a darkness round his heart, but Stiles didn't want to be the one who put one round everyone's heart. But he was and he is and he's the one who doesn't know what to say to Chris, who can't quite bring himself to look Lydia in the eye because she stayed to help him when she should've gone to help her best friend.

So Stiles shuts himself away, little by little. He helps Malia, but figures she deserves that much. No, he's not really in the mood for pizza with Scott and Isaac. Not this week, not next. (But he remembers that Allison hated plain cheese pizza, that she'd always grab the last slice of pepperoni.) No, he doesn't really feel like going down to the station for the day, like he would when he was little; doesn't really feel like seeing Deputy Parrish and knowing that the scar across his abdomen was because Stiles lost control of his subconscious. He's not in the mood to return the six missed calls he has from Lydia. (Once, what feels like a very long time ago but really was only a year or so, he'd have jumped at the chance to return even one missed call. It's all different now.) He killed Allison, indirectly maybe, but her blood's on his hands and why would anyone want to spend time with a murderer? (Aiden's death weighs on his conscience, too, and why would Lydia be interested in someone who killed her ex and her best friend?)

But Stiles doesn't count on Scott not giving in so easily, on the road trips he drags Stiles on spontaneously at the weekends. And then Stiles gives in, feels the grief when he realises what he has to live for, what Scott made him live for. "I'm sorry," he mumbles, "I'm so sorry." Over and over again and suddenly two teenaged boys are crying in the front of a banged-up Jeep, and it's a moment more cathartic than Stiles could have dreamed of.

He found life in Allison's death and he doesn't mean to forget that. _Live for her_, he thinks on mornings when the weight of the world wants to drag him down, _because she can't_.

Like losing a limb, Peter had said. Losing a pack member was like losing a limb. Derek knows the feeling only too well, knows each shallow breath and pounding headache and sense that something that's become quite vital is missing.

But Aiden and Allison are different because he's different. Not an Alpha anymore, not a leader bound to others to feel the pain of their separation from him. Just a friend. A friend who's lost friends.

So it's a different kind of pain he feels. A numbness, the sense that there's a void where something should be. He was closer to Aiden, senses the strangeness of a lone twin and finds himself expecting to see Ethan's mirror image by his side when he walks in. Derek doesn't do missing or over-sentimentality, he wasn't raised that way and has lived through too much to bother with emotions that only get in the way, but he comes dangerously close to missing Aiden, pain in the ass that he was.

It's even more different where Allison comes in. After so long spent hating the Argents, persuading Scott to give her up, refusing to trust an apparently reformed hunter, it's difficult for him to mourn the death of a once-sworn enemy. But she, too, had wormed her way into his life, in little ways he hadn't imagined or thought of when she was alive. She was resourceful, determined, mostly reliable (and even he could admit that she'd obviously got her looks from her father's side, not her mother's), and she'd meant something to Scott.

Who cares about people, not power.

So Derek holds his tongue, gives them all space, remembers how he raged against the world after the fire, and slowly realises that Scott's mantra has become his own. People, not power.

Lydia, who rejected makeup to cover her scars, who stalked the school hallways after running naked through the woods for two weeks, who dealt time after time with the illogicality of this world she's found herself in, is the first to succumb to the shattering pain of grief. She knows before it happens, suffers through the nogitsune's taunts in the knowledge that Allison, if she insists on being Allison, will die. She endures his baits, runs as fast as she can, aware that she will, after Jackson left and Aiden is past a third chance, be left alone again.

She damns and shouts at and curses the unfair world she's found herself in- and then realises she only made those sounds in her head and her lips won't form words beyond screams. Screaming. Always screaming: seems to be all she's good at nowadays.

She and Allison were supposed to find their graduation dresses together. Go to college together. Live together, share wedding days and nights that become mornings and the births of their children; be sisters in bond, if not blood.

And now none of that's going to happen. Now she's alone, a banshee surrounded by wolves, and realistically Stiles isn't going to want to help pick out her graduation colour scheme. And it hurts, hurts so badly that she thinks she might die from the pain of separation. Hurts so badly that she wakes up in the middle of the night, sweat rolling off her in sheets, begging her best friend to take her, too. Hurts so much that each coloured shirt she pulls on and each coat of mascara she applies to look somewhat normal, as though her life is still somewhat intact, is another dagger to the heart. Such a hypocritical betrayal but right now, Lydia isn't sure what else to do, when Kira's asking for advice when she's known the group for all of ten seconds, when Ethan's leaving town and Scott walks in a daze and Stiles is alive, but what kind of life is one spent pulling the pieces of your subconscious back into place?

Sometimes she hates Allison so much for being Allison and not following instructions, for leaving her to deal with everything alone. But only sometimes.

The pain of Aiden is something else, something only half there: felt when she saw that mass of bodies and knew instinctively who was dying, subdued when Stiles wrapped his arms around her and she breathed him in and saw Scott standing behind her. Because, in truth, he hadn't really had another chance, not after Boyd, but he's another one who's left her and she knows that Scott and Stiles, come what may, will catch her.

Sometimes, she thinks about phoning Jackson, gets as far as calling his number up onto her display, before she changes her mind and calls Scott instead.

Ethan, tethered to his brother in so many ways, feels the bond slip away before the life fades from his brother's eyes and all he can do is sob and cradle Aiden's body closer to his. The Omegas. The outsiders. The ones who never fitted in, who never would. Never really the good guys, only Aiden died trying to prove the opposite and only succeeded in solidifying what they both already knew. And Scott wasn't even there when it happened.

He leaves. He misses the wind in his hair and the dirt grinding its way under his fingernails and knows he has to do twice as much, enjoy it twice as much for the missing half of him. And where the feeling, he knows, will lessen for the others, it only intensifies over time for him. Because Aiden was his pack and his twin and his brother, and the pain of division is correspondingly higher. And now he's just the lone wolf and it's only the shadow that gets thrown beside him that makes him feel, ever so slightly, that he's one half of a whole again.

It takes time. Time and tears and stilted conversations about the future, half-voiced thoughts and condolences, and eventually the pack reforms. Gradually, slowly: at an evolutionary pace, the texts increase and phone calls go on for longer and they can look each other in the eye without apologies and anger being written there. There's a commonality of cause, of belief, of being that no Alpha's roar can create, and the pack solidifies into something stronger than ever. They find a unit and a purpose and a life in death, and they think that perhaps they are the lucky ones.


End file.
